If your company has recently invested in HubSpot software, it may be time to get started with the HubSpot onboarding process. That may sound scary, but it’s just your way of making sure you make the most out of your investment. After all, HubSpot offers dozens of features that many businesses fail to take full advantage of.
What Is HubSpot Onboarding?
In short, HubSpot onboarding is the process of training a team or company and helping them configure their HubSpot software settings to get the most out of the platform.
The goal of any HubSpot onboarding program is to get your team up to speed with things like HubSpot CRM, Service Hub, Marketing Hub, Lead Scoring, and general best practices. Most, if not all, HubSpot onboarding services will include live training sessions. This is one of the most effective ways to teach the skills necessary to fully utilize the software.
Common Challenges with HubSpot
Embracing HubSpot
One of the earliest and most evident challenges with using HubSpot is getting the entire team used to the software. It can be a challenge because your team is already used to using different software platforms for sales processes, lead generation, marketing automations, and perhaps even lead scoring. However, HubSpot offers so many of these software services it’s worth working through an onboarding plan to ensure a smooth transition.
Data Migration Issues
Of course, moving your data and contacts from other platforms to HubSpot CRM, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, Sales Hub, and more will be complex and involve issues. Data syncing, deal stage mapping issues, and others are common. However, this shouldn’t stop you from trying. HubSpot’s onboarding services or third-party onboarding services through HubSpot experts can avoid these pitfalls and lead your company to an excellent HubSpot experience.
Reporting Implementation
If you’re planning to get the most out of your HubSpot experience, it’s imperative to properly set up your reporting. This ensures that you’re able to track KPIs accurately and achieve goals using custom reporting. Without accurate reporting, how can you be sure you’re on the right track?
Efficient Automation
Automation, especially marketing automation, is one of the best ways for businesses to save money and catalyze business growth simultaneously. Furthermore, HubSpot Marketing Hub has all the tools you need to create top-notch workflows and automation. However, without Marketing Hub onboarding, you may be unable to get it working in the most efficient way possible.
Benefits of Onboarding
Familiarize Your Team With HubSpot
Live training sessions with HubSpot experts will teach your team every relevant function available in HubSpot and how to best use them to achieve your business goals. This will give your company and its members the know-how and confidence to run with the platform going forward, even when the experts are gone.
Prepare Assets (Workflows, Pipelines, Sequences)
HubSpot offers many great tools to create email templates, forms, landing pages, workflows, and more. It’s not particularly difficult to utilize these tools, but sometimes it’s hard when you’re new to the platform. Luckily, a HubSpot onboarding process can help your team create these assets to match your needs and specifications during your onboarding process.
Ensure a Return on Your Investment
If you’re a small company, the investment you’ve made into HubSpot was probably quite significant. There’s no shame in admitting that you’d like a return on that investment, as that’s what any sensible business person would want to do. However, if you don’t utilize it to the fullest extent, there’s no guarantee it’ll help your business at all. Some parts of the onboarding process, such as Marketing Hub onboarding and Sales Hub onboarding, are essential to ensuring HubSpot saves your business money and helps your sales team generate extra revenue!
Free Your Team With Automations
Utilizing HubSpot’s automation tools in the Marketing Hub and Sales Hub can unburden your sales and marketing professionals substantially. This won’t happen if they spend all day tinkering with HubSpot instead! An effective HubSpot onboarding plan will help you with the tech setup involved in creating workflows, sequences, and pipelines that automate as many tasks as possible. Any time your sales agents are needed for a call or meeting, HubSpot will notify them, giving them free rein to use the time in between for other important tasks!
Clear up Your Goals and Expectations
Perhaps your team doesn’t even know what’s possible or feasible to accomplish with HubSpot. One of the first things any onboarding expert will do with you is to have a kickoff call where they offer technical and strategic guidance to help you determine how your business will use HubSpot and what you hope to accomplish.
When Do You Need HubSpot Onboarding?
It’s definitely not mandatory to purchase HubSpot’s onboarding services or services offered by onboarding experts if you have a subscription to HubSpot. However, many businesses will want to if they wish to competently accomplish any of the following without an in-house expert or experts to guide them:
- Automate the generation of leads and the nurturing process
- Automate parts of the sales process
- Get the most out of the HubSpot Service Hub, Marketing Hub, CMS Hub, and Sales Hub
- Automate tasks related to social accounts
- Effortlessly create landing pages
- Scale up the business with data-backed decision making
If your business is still very small, you don’t have a lot of data to work with, and you don’t want to automate much of anything yet, it may not be best to commission an onboarding plan.
HubSpot Onboarding Checklist
The specific action items in your onboarding plan will obviously vary between agency partners, and HubSpot’s own services will be different as well. However, the types of services offered will have many similarities. Here are some of the things that might be included.
- Account Settings Assistance
- Data Migration and Synchronization
- Social Media Scheduler Setup
- Google Integrations (Analytics, Ads, Search Console, etc.)
- Custom Integrations
- Workflow, Sequence, and Pipeline Creation
- Lead Scoring and Segmentation Automations
- Template Creation
- Reporting Dashboard Creation
This is by no means a comprehensive list of offerings, but it’s a basic HubSpot onboarding checklist that covers many of the things you’ll see in nearly every onboarding plan. The point of an onboarding plan isn’t just to do all of the work for you, but sometimes the onboarding specialists will do some of the asset creation for you. However, the goal is to equip your team with the tools needed to continue using the platform in an optimal way on their own. So, how long should an onboarding plan take?
HubSpot Onboarding Timeline
As mentioned above, HubSpot offers its own onboarding services. However, another common way of onboarding your team with HubSpot is to use an Agency Partner like Lead Launcher. While HubSpot’s onboarding services typically take around three months to complete, Agency Partners may take more or less time, depending on the depth of services needed.
Larger teams with more extensive needs may require as many as three to four months, but most of the time, the process is shorter, like four to ten weeks. However, even if your team is able to complete the onboarding plan in under three months, HubSpot recommends considering a 3-month period before observing results. This is because it takes a while to get an idea of how smoothly everything is running.
How Much Does HubSpot Onboarding Cost?
Just like with the timeline of onboarding, the pricing of onboarding will differ based on a few factors. Firstly, HubSpot’s native services will generally cost more than an Agency Partner. However, your costs will also depend heavily on the size of your team and the needs of the business. Service Hub onboarding will typically cost about $500 to $3,000 through HubSpot and slightly less through an Agency Partner. Sales Hub onboarding will cost about $500 to $8,000 through HubSpot and significantly less through an Agency Partner. Finally, Marketing Hub onboarding will cost from about $3,000 to $15,000 through HubSpot while being monumentally cheaper through an Agency Partner. These comparisons highlight one thing in particular, which is that Agency Partners offer a substantially less expensive onboarding experience.
Onboarding with HubSpot vs. Onboarding with an Agency Partner
There are benefits and drawbacks to onboarding with HubSpot as well as with an Agency Partner. To be succinct, we’ll start with the pros and cons of working with HubSpot.
HubSpot’s Onboarding Services – Pros
- HubSpot’s onboarding comes straight from the source; you’ll be working with HubSpot team members who are the utmost globally acclaimed experts on their software.
- The HubSpot team has watched many businesses use their software and therefore has some of the best strategy-building techniques available.
HubSpot’s Onboarding Services – Cons
- If your company or team is on a tight budget, HubSpot’s services might break the bank.
- HubSpot is not willing to do any hands-on work like creating workflows and templates; they’ll simply guide your team to complete the actions.
- The services offered won’t be as extensive, meaning you’re not getting as many services even though it’s more costly.
- HubSpot’s services will require much more of your team’s time, so it’s not great for teams with busy schedules.
Agency Partner Services – Pros
- The most obvious benefit to choosing an Agency for onboarding is the reduced cost. This means it’s great for small to medium-sized businesses.
- An Agency Partner will offer more extensive services to compete with HubSpot.
- Much less effort is required from your team to complete the onboarding process because Agency Partners are willing to get their hands dirty and create assets for you!
Agency Partner Services – Cons
- Some Agencies won’t have as much expertise on HubSpot platforms, and how to effectively use them, so not all of them will be able to deliver optimal results.
- The pricing is much harder to predict with an Agency. Also, each of these Agencies has differing pricing models from each other, making it even harder to be sure. It’s best that you reach out to the company you’re looking to commission for onboarding and ask for a quote to be sure.
Why Lead Launcher for Onboarding
Lead Launcher, a HubSpot Solutions Partner agency, can help you get the most out of your investment in the world-class software that is HubSpot. We’ll analyze your current marketing strategies and create an efficient plan for onboarding to ensure you’re getting the most out of your new software as quickly as possible.